GIF of the Day: Tormento de Cuauhtémoc

I’m in Mexico City, which has an overwhelming number of museums. I follow a bunch of them on social media and noticed that many institutions make animated GIFs out of works in their collection or exhibitions. This one, from Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, is really creepy.

They’ve animated the David Alfaro Siqueiros mural “Tormento de Cuauhtémoc” in honor of what would’ve been the Mexican painter’s 120th birthday. The museum has an amazing collection of murals, many of which document the city’s turbulent past. This one memorializes the torture of Aztec ruler Cuauhtémoc by the Spanish conquistadors, who were trying to extract the secret locations of Tenochtitlan’s treasures. They were assholes. Maybe it’s a small consolation that Cuauhtémoc is now memorialized in so many ways: my closest metro station is named after him, he’s represented in murals, and now GIFs.